 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video we're going to talk about the raking and rhythm technique of blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan. The technique we're going to be talking about sounds like this. This is that really cool sounding, really well known Texas blues style shuffle that you hear in a huge amount of Stevie Ray Vaughan tracks, most notably one of his most famous tracks Pride and Joy. So in this video we're going to break down that technique so you guys can use this in your own playing. All the tones you're hearing today in this video are coming from my early 1980s Tokai Strat which is plugged into the Blackstar HT20 Mark II. I've got the amp set on the drive channel with the drive just under halfway to give me a nice crunchy sound. So this technique and this riff is actually a lot easier to play than it sounds. There's just a few simple things that you piece together to make this sound. So first of all let's look at what my fretting hand is doing. So with my fretting hand I'm just playing notes from the E Dorian mode. So what I'm playing is the open low E and the third fret. On the A string I'm playing the 2 on the 4. And then on the D string I'm playing the 2. And then I'm just coming down that again. Each of those notes is going to land on one beat for two bars. So it's the first to the fourth beat in the first bar and then the first to the fourth beat in the second bar. The next part of this riff is the muted upstrokes that precede each of the notes. So I'm just doing this. Just muting the strings with my fretting hand and dragging up the strings with my picking hand. So you may notice me doing this circular motion. This is something that Stevie does a lot in order to keep the rhythm. So you may see him playing the open or the fretted notes on the down with a straight pick and then the mute with this kind of flick around. So now that we've talked about the two main components of this which is what the fretting hand is doing and the muted rakes with the picking hand we now need to talk about the timing. And the timing of this is the thing that makes this sound like Stevie Ray Vaughan. We're playing what is called a triplet feel. So just imagine your standard four beats per bar but a triplet on each beat. A triplet is three notes on a beat. One and a. So if we imagine that kind of shuffle feel with three notes on every beat what we're doing is the fretted notes or the open strings are happening on the beat and this muted rake is happening on the a. One and a two and a three. So what we get is one, a two, a three, a four, a one. So this actually sounds a little bit too straight to be played exactly the way that Stevie plays it. You will see it notated this way because theoretically we're going for a triplet feel here but what Stevie does is he actually hangs back slightly on the muted note. So it's a little bit closer to the beat it's not quite all a triplet it's sort of just after the third note of a triplet beat this gives it a little bit more of an urgent feel. So a good way to imagine this is like you're rushing to fit that muted note in. So we're doing this little flick straight into the note. So we're sort of going for the fundamentals of a triplet feel but we're pushing that last note a little bit closer to the edge to get that urgent feel to it. Now it really comes into its own when you start playing it at full speed that's when you really get the push of that urgent feeling upstream. So there you go there is a little breakdown on the Texas Blues Stevie Ray Vaughan style shuffle with fretted notes and muted outbreaks. This is a really cool technique and you can apply this into loads of different rhythmic things you could be playing a riff and you could use these muted outbreaks to add different accents to the riffs or to push on to other notes especially if you delay that last upstroke slightly just to get that urgent feel like Stevie Ray Vaughan does. When practicing this technique practice it slow make sure you nail it as a triplet first even though it won't sound exactly like Stevie Ray Vaughan as a triplet because it's a little bit too straight it's very important you get the triplet side of it down first and then you can start pushing that final triplet beat a little later to get that slightly more urgent feel. If there are any of the techniques riffs licks or tricks that you want to see us break down in these videos please let us know down below in the comments and don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more free lesson videos just like this one and if you're looking for guitar teacher in your local area please check out MusicTeacher.com there's a great network of guitar teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.